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The more I looked at my present alphabet for Sehali, the more I didn’t much like it. It’s neat, but it’s busy. It has a connector like devanagari script, but why? A third of the full glyph is taken up by the vowel, even though the language only has four. And ultimately, it just didn’t give that “snakey” feel I really wanted to have.

Now, it was only my second script I’d created since actually getting into conlanging, so in the end it was just an experiment, and I wouldn’t call it a failed one. It is a pretty script, just not what I want for my lizard-pirate species.

I’ve been dwelling on this for quite some time and finally, over my birthday, sat down and started creating another, inspired by Arabic and Mongolian. I wanted something that would still have that sometimes mind-numbing complexity and alien oddity to it, but with funny scripts like the two mentioned existing in the human world I wasn’t entirely sure how to do that. Finally I considered, what if the script was cursive, but with breaks in the cursivity, and that’s where the consonants were? And thus the current snakey script was born.

It was quite the trouble creating my first ever cursive script, but I’m relatively happy with the result. It can use some cleaning up, but I’ll have to learn how to do that efficiently first.

So a week or two ago, I spent sixteen hours straight (that’s right: not even a bite to eat or a sit to poop) in a flurry of creativity to create the Sehali alphabet. It’s my first completely original alphabet in a rather long time, and it’s quite complex, working as a kind of composed syllabary, like hangul (Korean script). I’ve got it working nicely in tandem with the keyboard layout, which has changed a little to accommodate it. Don’t worry, though: it’s still full of all those dots and macrons and diaereses and circumflexes above and below everything to make it look like some sort of weird topsy-turvy agglutinating Vietnamese when written in Latin. I’m only just now writing a blog post about it, and the language still has a slim vocabulary, but I’ll celebrate by translating this blog’s title into my new lizardy script: